I Lost My Mind

As I mentioned earlier, my classes this term are pretty awesome. It is so refreshing to have students who actually want to be there (or at least don't mind sitting through it). The best part of this term, though, is the amount of really intelligent kids I have. It's shocking when kids answer simple yes or no questions, so you can imagine my surprise when students are coming up with abstract questions of their own, and responding to complex queries. Here are some impressive examples:

We are talking about spies during the Civil War right now. This particular story was about a man named Timothy who was spying for the North, pretending to work as a spy for the South. In other words, Timothy was a "double agent." Anyway, in the end, Timothy is hanged for his treason in the South. During the execution, the knot in the noose becomes untied, and the man only falls to the ground, his life momentarily spared. Minutes later, the hanging is successful, and Timothy is killed. The students were instructed to come up with a suitable title for this particular passage of the story. In my Teacher's Guide, I had "Timothy's Hanging" and most of the students had similar answers such as "The Death of Timothy" etc. My one student David, though, titled the passage "Double Agent, Double Death." Isn't that clever?

In the same class the critical thinking project was about capital punishment, and whether you approve or disapprove, and why. The same student, David and his partner Kevin, presented me their three reasons for wanting to abolish capital punishment:
1. We need to defend human rights.
2. There is no real compensation to the families for killing a criminal.
3. Capital punishment does not decrease crime.
These kids are 7th graders, mind you. I think that those three are pretty damn good arguments considering that capital punishment is not even an issue of debate in this country. Probably the most shocking aspect of all was that their grammar was almost completely correct--a rarity in class. So what if they wrote "dicreese?" I was smitten to have such smarties--and liberal ones at that!

This last example is a student I had last term, that I had forgotten to post about. He was a 3rd grader in my EC2 class, which is the lowest level I have had yet, and the second lowest in the entire academy. Needless to say, expectations were very low. They had to work on a thinking project in which they described something they had lost in the past and answer questions like why are they looking for this thing? where would they look for it? what would they do? who would they ask to help them? and so on and so on.
My one student presented that he had lost his mind. This was a very bad thing because now he was crazy. He would look for it everywhere, because since he had lost his mind, he would not know where to look. He would go to the hospital to ask a doctor to help him and tell him that he was crazy. Maybe the doctor could perform a surgery and help him get his mind back.
I was astonished. There are so many implications about this student in this one project. First of all, he understands the phrase "losing your mind" perfectly. For a child that young to understand the concept of expressive language is very impressive, and this is in a foreign language! Second, he is obviously very sharp to turn such a mundane project into something creative and funny. As his fellow students would say, "GENIUS-UH!" (they love that word and they add an extra syllable to everything)